Obama’s tax campaign has no credibility

September 24, 2011

Freedom New Mexico

Yes, President Barack Obama, it is time to panic.

Advice to “panic” was given to Obama by close ally James Carville, former advisor to President Bill Clinton, after Republicans won the special election in New York’s ultra liberal Ninth District this month with a candidate who ran an anti-Obama campaign. The Ninth hasn’t elected a Republican since 1923.

The Ninth District’s newest member of Congress, Robert Turner, created and launched Rush Limbaugh’s 1990s TV show. He is a staunch opponent of abortion and same-sex marriage. Turner wants intelligent design taught in public schools. He seeks to eliminate capital gains taxes. He signed Grover Norquist’s “no new taxes under any circumstances” pledge in 2010. The left’s worst nightmare was just elected to represent a bastion of liberals by a margin of nearly 10 percent.

Panic? At the very least, President Obama. You may have managed, in three years, to destroy faith in liberalism even among liberals.

Wednesday, things got even worse for Obama — a man elected to the highest executive office in the land without a day of executive experience. On Wednesday, the mainstream media carried a story by the Associated Press — hardly a critical Obama watchdog — that said his class warfare campaign is based on mythology.

Obama has traveled the country trying to incite anger by saying the rich don’t pay their fair share, and even claiming that wealthy Americans pay lower tax rates than the middle class and poor. So the AP went on a fact-checking mission, perhaps expecting to prove Obama’s case. Analyzing government and private data, the AP found that America’s wealthiest citizens pay “a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor… They pay at a higher rate, and as a group, they contribute a much larger share of the overall taxes collected by the federal government.”

The AP reported that 10 percent of households with the highest incomes pay more than 70 percent of federal income taxes. Fewer than 1 percent of millionaires pay tax rates lower than middle-income workers.

Relying on data from the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, the AP explained how the tax code’s $1 trillion in annual deductions, exemptions and credits “benefit people at every income level,” not just the rich. In other words, the Associated Press — often accused of pro-Obama bias — exposed the president’s pitch for higher taxes as a sham.

“Pass the bill,” Obama chanted while promoting a massive tax increase disguised as a jobs bill.

He must be joking. Soon, Americans will start chanting “kill the bill.” Almost no one — not even those in the Obama-friendly mainstream national press — believes that soaking over-taxed Americans will create jobs. It can’t possibly achieve this. It can only increase the size and cost of government, a move that may serve a final blow to our beleaguered economy.